Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

As wildfires become more frequent and intense across Europe, attracting growing public and media attention, journalists need solid methods to analyze fire data over time. But building a dataset is only the beginning. This session goes beyond the story to explore how to sustain and adapt a data project over more than a decade, using Civio’s Spain in Flames as a case study.

In this session, we'll share best practices for long-term data journalism: designing datasets that can evolve, working with fragmented official sources, handling changes in definitions, revising past data responsibly, and deciding what comparisons remain valid over time. The talk covers both data processing workflows and visualization strategies that hold up as your project grows.

In the context of increasingly severe wildfire seasons, this session offers replicable methods and tips for building climate data projects that last and that can inform responsible reporting for years to come.

We can all agree that Europe’s green energy transition is critical. But the transition has to be fair and not leave anyone behind. Therefore, the EU’s €26.7 billion Just Transition Fund – which is intended to support communities shift away from fossil fuel industries, such as coal mining, to greener economies – is hugely important. But, surprise, surprise, those crucial billions do not appear to be going where the EU promised they would. In this presentation, we will explain how our cross-border team dug into the fund – FOIs, sources in the European Parliament, following the money – with the aim of helping you to do exactly the same and find your own exclusives.

In this session, we’ll show you how we approached a sensitive topic: mapping the potential exposure of all schools to the use of pesticides from surrounding agricultural activities. We will explain  how - working with scientists - we came up with a robust methodology,  found the data we needed and then crunched it to tell us where to go to make truly data-driven reporting on the ground.  

This investigation, published in Le Monde in December 2025, has sparked a lot of national and local interest thanks to its interactive map. Attendees will leave the session with a clear step-by-step guide to get started and adapt the ambition of the investigation to their own capacity. Feel free to bring with you any datasets that would help to map similar issues in your country.

You can read the main story in English here
Free access to the map in French here